Like many vertigo sufferers, I still have to work for a living.   Some days I’ll go to work at my office feeling fine and then have a vertigo attack in the middle of the day.  I have to drive home, and that’s 60 miles with a plastic bag handy in case I upchuck my lunch.  Amazingly, driving somehow steadies my twitching eyes so that I’m less likely to throw up.  I can’t walk a straight line, but I can drive.  I’m thankful for that.

But if I could only work from home, I could do much better.  So I’m trying to find ways to work from home.  You’ve seen my iPhone and Android apps on the sidebars of this blog. Another way is to write books.

I’ve written three books.  One is a tongue-in-cheek training manual for IT managers called 77 Sure-Fire Ways to Kill a Software Project.  Do the opposite of what is in this book, and you should be a reasonably good manager.  The second book was a novel, Death on Delivery, about a software project where the developers are getting killed off one by one.

Now I’ve got a second novel, Field Piece, about an American agent sent to Azerbaidzhan to stop the black market trading of American high-tech weapons into the hands of Muslim freedom fighters.  The hero gets into a lot of trouble, especially when he tangles with a Persian femme fatale who is a little too involved in the whole mess.  It’s 577 pages (nominally) on Amazon Kindle, and it’s only $0.99 (introductory price).  I had a lot of fun researching it and writing it.  I hope you have a good time reading it.

Posted under Uncategorized

When I found out that soy gives me vertigo, I was overjoyed because I knew why I was suffering and I knew how to avoid it.  But then occasionally I still get vertigo.  What’s up with that?

Some of these attacks I can explain because I’ve eaten a food product that probably had soy in it, even though soy was not an ingredient listed on the package.  These items say “. . . made in a factory that also produces soy products . . . ” or something similar.  OK, that makes sense.  Produced on the same assembly line so the equipment may be contaminated with soy. Or there was soy in the air.  I don’t know.  I have no idea just how much soy is necessary to set off my vertigo.  Apparently not too much.

But then there are vertigo attacks for which I can determine no soy contamination. What caused these?  Some other allergen probably, and I’m in the process of trying to determine what that is.  My candidates are my chewable allergen-free vitamin pills, dairy products, and nuts.

How do I plan to determine which of these three items is the culprit?

MY PLAN:

Step 1:  Cut out all possible foods causing vertigo until I am living on just a few items.  For me that is some gluten-free cereal, almond milk, gluten-free bread, Boar’s Head lightly-browned turkey, Coca-Cola (thank God Coke doesn’t have soy in it!), applesauce, baked potato with no butter.  No vitamin pills.  Nothing else.  I could have a lot of veges and fruits I suppose, but I’ve got some other GI problems that preclude a lot of those.  Anyway, the point is that I get down to the basics where I’m OK.

Step 2:  Stay on that minimal diet for a couple weeks, hopefully experiencing no vertigo attacks.  If I have a vertigo attack, I have to go back to square one and cut out something else.

Step 3:  For one week add just one item to the minimal diet and see if I get vertigo.  This week it was my supposedly allergen-free vitamin pills.  Well, I haven’t had any vertigo this week, so I guess they’re all right.

Step 4:  Next week try adding some other suspected item to the minimal diet and see what happens.

You get the idea.  I’ll let you know what happens . . .

Posted under Causes, Treatment